Medical practices are divided into special fields, and it is general to request a specialist to interpret a medical image captured with an image diagnosis apparatus. The specialist, namely, a radiologist displays the medical image that the radiologist is requested to interpret, on a monitor such as a liquid crystal display or a CRT (cathode-ray tube) display, and writes a diagnostic report on the result of the interpretation. The radiologist displays a medical image to be compared with the medical image to be interpreted or displays a previous diagnostic report similar in case or diagnosed disease name and uses as a reference material.
A diagnostic report generated in the past is stored in a storing apparatus provided with a hard disk or the like. To read out a diagnostic report to be used as a reference material from the storing apparatus, for example, keyword search by an inputted search term is performed with a searching apparatus (refer to Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2007-293521, for example).
A conventional searching apparatus performs full-text search when searching for a diagnostic report including a similar case or a similar diagnosed disease name. This searching apparatus then presents a list of all diagnostic reports including an inputted term.
This full-text search of referring to text data within diagnostic reports requires a lot of search time and may decrease the efficiency of interpretation. Moreover, even if the full-text search is finished after a lot of time is spent, the value of reference varies depending on the diagnostic reports in the list, and it is hard to determine which diagnostic report is useful. Besides, since the full-text search is search by simple character-string comparison, such a diagnostic report that actually has a relation but is written in a different expression cannot be extracted as the result of the search. Since it is required after the search to display the diagnostic reports in the list one by one and confirm the contents thereof, a lot of time is wasted in finding a desired reference material, and the efficiency of interpretation may be further decreased. In addition, it is difficult to find an appropriate reference material from the list of a huge number of diagnostic reports, so that there is a possibility that any diagnostic report to be referred is not included in the list actually, or there is a case that a diagnostic report that should be truly referred to cannot be confirmed.